Wednesday, 8 October 2014

RUNNING FOR YOUR LIFE IN WILD WEST DURHAM - KENNY TWIGG PART TWO

Kenny Twigg made his debut for Bishop Auckland when he was seventeen. 'There was a flu epidemic in Durham, half the team went down with it.' His first game was against Shildon. The Railwaymen were Bishops' biggest rivals in the Northern League, they had won the title four times in the previous five years. The game at Dean Street brought Kenny up against the legendary full-back Alf 'Wacker' Wild.

'People say Alf Wild was terrifying. And it's true that when he tackled you, you knew you'd been tackled. But I tell you something about him. I was pretty quick. First time I got the ball I pushed it round him and I was away, got my cross in. He trotted over, 'You're a young lad and you're new to this,' He said, 'So I'm going to let you off that one. Next time you do it, I'll break your bloody leg', So, you see, Alf Wild was rough, but he gave you fair warning.'

“People forget,’ Kenny Twigg said, ‘That in the 1938/39
season Bishops not only won the Amateur Cup and the Northern League title, we also won the Durham Challenge Cup. In my book that last one was the greatest
achievement. The Durham Challenge Cup was harder to win than the Amateur Cup.
The standard of football in County Durham was tremendous. There were hundreds
of sides. Everyone was desperate to do well - especially against the big clubs
like us. It was fierce.’Sometimes literally.

‘We played a tie one time up by Stanley. Middle of winter.
Ruddy freezing. Wind going right through you. The ground was packed. There was
2-3000 in there. The home side scored early. From then on we were all over
them. Chance after chance. You could feel the tension rising. Five minutes from
time Matty Slee goes down in their penalty area. The ref points to the spot.
Straight away the crowd comes hurtling onto the pitch, screaming blue
murder. We ran for our lives. The officials came charging off with us. We piled
into the dressing room, barricaded the door. They were trying to kick it down.
Took an hour for the police to calm things. Our team coach had to have an
escort out of town. There was a replay. The police told us to have it on the
morning and not publicise it in the newspapers. We played the match
virtually in secret, beat them in front of two sets of committee men and the
tea ladies.’

I said, I thought crowd trouble was something that only
started in the 1970s.

‘Oh you’d be surprised what went on back then,’ Kenny Twigg
said with a chuckle, ‘especially out there. In Wild West Durham in those days
anything could happen.’

Who knows what triumphs Bishops treble winning team might
have gone onto if the war had not intervened. Kenny Twigg joined up. He kept
fit playing wartime football. At
Ayresome Park he lined up against George Hardwick. Captain of Middlesbrough and
England, Gorgeous George was the Clark Gable of the game. After the match Kenny
Twigg came out of the changing rooms to find his wife in a flustered state.
‘When I asked what the matter was she said, ‘Ooh I've just seen George Hardwick
in his RAF uniform and my legs have all gone to jelly.’

(After he finished playing Kenny Twigg coached Billingham Sythonia. That's him on the left in the snazzy belted coat. The season was 1950/51. 'We finished second. We only conceded 24 goals, which is still a Northern League record.')

After the War Ken Twigg left Bishop Auckland. He'd been offered terms by various League clubs, including Chester, but 'I had a good job and in those days, with the maximum wage, you could earn a better living working and playing part-time than you could as a full-time pro'. So he went to
play for Spennymoor United. Spennymoor played in The North
Eastern League. While the Northern League was - ostensibly at least - amateur, the North Eastern League was professional. Founded in
1906 it ran until the late-1950s. In the 1940s Blyth Spartans, North Shields, South
Shields, Consett, Stockton, Ashington and Horden played in it. So did
Workington and the reserve teams of Sunderland, Middlesbrough, Hartlepool,
Darlington, Gateshead and Carlisle.

‘The first year I was at Brewery Field we won the title,’
Kenny Twigg said, ‘that was remarkable really, when you see the teams we
were up against.’

I asked him how the standard’s compared with the Northern
League. His reply has stuck with me ever since. ‘There was no comparison,’
Kenny Twigg said, ‘The North Eastern League was so much better – it was professional!
Now, a professional - I don’t care what job he does - he always knows more
about his trade than any amateur. He lives his work.’

‘I’ll give you an example. Spennymoor had this veteran
centre forward, Alf White – he’d been born in the town. He was knocking on
forty by then, but he’d spent four seasons at Derby County, played 150 odd
games for Bournemouth in Division Three (South), been at Wrexham. He was still
a hell of a player. The first game I played for Moors I got the ball on the
touchline, in our half, facing towards our goal. There was an opponent on my
back, so I did what I’d have done at Bishops in the same situation: I played
safe, kicked the ball into touch. Next second there’s Alf White yelling in
my face, what the ruddy hell was a playing at giving possession away?

‘Why didn’t you pass to me?’ he said.

I said, ‘I had my back turned. I didn’t know where you
were.’

He said, ‘If you were me, where would you have been?’

I said, ‘I don’t know, I suppose on this same touchline
looking for a pass up the line.’

Alf White scowled. He said, ‘There you bloody go then. Next time, play the ball where you think I’ll be, because that’s where
you’ll bloody well find me.’

‘That was the difference,’ Ken Twigg said. ‘The pros
understood the game. The amateurs, the amateurs just played it.’

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About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.